How to Boost Productivity for Startups? Here are 12 Free Tools to Use

As a person who is looking to start a new business with limited budget and resources, you end up being a boss who deals with different tasks such as technical issues, management strategy, marketing plans, training employees, etc. In such situation, you need to automate your business tasks to improve your productivity and get the maximum out of your time.

You can’t afford to waste your time which directly means wasting your money. A survey suggests that businesses waste a lot of their time in meetings. You must look for ways to eliminate meetings because they aren’t productive most of the time. Boosting up your productivity becomes necessary to handle multiple jobs at the same time.

Fortunately, there are applications available on the market that helps you to boost your productivity by automating your important business tasks. We have gathered a list of top 12 tools that can help you manage and organize your business processes and tasks so that you can focus on reaching out to as many clients and customers as possible. Read on.

Evernote

Evernote is one of the best apps to help you stay organized. You can use it to take notes when you’re collaborating with your clerical or managerial team and in business meetings. The app becomes your personal assistant that organizes your important project ideas and makes them accessible in few clicks.

Use Evernote for note taking with the service of notebook sharing. There’s another perk for small businesses: Evernote offers a free package that supports 2 devices with sixty megabytes of space. The ability to analyze handwriting is the best feature. You can scan your documents with handwritten content and the application will make the text searchable.

Trello

Trello is a popular task management app that offers you a billboard look-alike system (KANBAN) to organize your tasks. The app is similar to a whiteboard loaded with sticky notes. You can add as many sticky notes as you need. To understand it better, let’s put it this way: the application is a free alternative to using multiple spreadsheets.

In addition to task organizing, you can use this application to collaborate with your managers and team. Add people to the board, tag notes with them, and add alerts to prioritize your tasks.

Use it to manage your daily team tasks, daily goals, and action plan. Trello helps you to collaborate with the team without having to call physical meetings.

Slack

Slack is a chat application that helps you to communicate with your team members, managers, clients, etc. You can message the whole team in the #lobby and address individuals in personal messaging. Don’t confuse it with an email platform. It’s an online platform where you can create channels “#” and communicate with the participants.

The slack platform supports attachments so you can share your important files with your team members and managers. Also, your technical team can help fix issues after seeing screenshots sent to them.

As a startup business, you should use this application as a collaboration tool that supports both live and offline communications.

LastPass

LastPass is a secure password manager that stores and keeps your passwords secure. All your important passwords are secured by a master password. You can get the browser extensions for the latest LastPass and forget about remembering passwords for your different accounts and logins.

After you set a master password, decrypting your data isn’t possible for the LastPass employees. This level of encryption service gives you a peace of mind that important passwords are secure.

Use LastPass to manage a list of your important accounts and login automatically with a few clicks. The best thing about LastPass is that you can use it without paying a single penny.

IFTTT

If “This” Then “That” (IFTTT) is a top recommendation for startup businesses who wish to automate small business tasks. IFTTT is a gift of modern technology that helps you automate important processes through a user-friendly interface. You can combine the processes of different applications and use them for desired outcomes.

This application will automate so many important tasks for your new business. Moreover, you can use the IFTTT without having to pay a single penny. Just sign up for an online account and you’re ready to start automating your tasks by creating your first applet.

HootSuite

HootSuite is social media management software that supports personal LinkedIn accounts, Foursquare, Twitter accounts, and Facebook pages and profiles. The tool makes it convenient for you to manage your social networks and connect with the main stream to keep an eye on posts at different networks.

The stats tab inside HootSuite interface allows you to view a list of clickthroughs on your Twitter account. You can also narrow down your search by adding a “date” filter to find your existing tweets.

The HootSuite app will help a startup business to manage all their social network postings through one platform and also, post one post on different platforms at the same time.

Google Drive

Google Drive is an online alternative to Microsoft Office Suite. You can create spreadsheets, documents and presentations one place and make them accessible through desktop applications and URLs.

Just create a Gmail account and start using Google Drive for free. You can view, edit, print and download your existing documents. Moreover, you can share documents with multiple recipients so they can access and edit the documents.

If you have to deal with documents on a daily basis as a business, you should use Google Drive. You can share spreadsheets to manage your daily tasks with your team.

Grammarly

Grammarly is the best spelling, grammar and punctuation checker available in the market. The application helps you to correct your small grammatical mistakes with suggestions and notifications. As a business owner, it’s important to write flawless notes for your employees.

The application is available in two packages. The free package comes with basic grammar and spell checker while the premium package allows you to correct advanced punctuation and grammatical mistakes.

TeamViewer

TeamViewer is one of the best remote access tools available in the market. As a startup businessman, you may have to deal with different scenarios where you have to access screens of your employee’s computer for some important tasks.

Being able to remote access an employee’s computer makes it easier to explain complicated business processes. For voice, you can use Skype, etc.

Mainly, TeamViewer is suitable for an IT team to handle customer service. No matter if you have in-house or remote employees, they can get their computer issues fixed from an IT person through TeamViewer.

LightShot

LightShot is a top screen capturing tool that simplifies screen capturing. The tool allows you to capture customized screenshots in a matter of few seconds. This application gives you an advanced level of screen capturing options that make it easy to perform the tedious but complex task: the print screen.

The screen capture tool LightShot can be used to keep a record of your employee’s tasks if you tell them to send you screenshots as a verification of task completion. Screenshots also help in troubleshooting different computer errors. Even IT teams prefer using such tools in case screen sharing isn’t possible.

Keyword Planner Tool

Google Keyword Planner Tool helps you to take informed decisions about the best keywords after a complete keyword research. Keyword research is an important and effective part of online marketing. You can’t reach the maximum amount of people unless you perform a detailed keyword search.

Moreover, keyword research is the utmost part of Search Engine Optimization. You can identify keyword popularity and define a marketing strategy.

The Keyword Planner Tool offers you features that include keyword combination creator, keyword popularity identifier, track searches volume, etc. For a startup business, it’s important to do proper keyword research to launch an online campaign.

Google Trends

Google Trends is a web facility where you can analyze how often a search term is used. The Google Search provides you with filters through which you can look for searches made from countries, time zones, languages, etc.

If you are going to start a new business, you must use this tool to compare brand health in various areas. It will help you to establish a better business decision once you know the potential of business in the market.

Thanks to Google, we can analyze the potential of a business in different areas, age groups, countries, etc. Now, launching an online business is really easy after researching firstly the market, and then trends of a business in the targeted market.

Conclusion

By using the tools discussed above, you can easily automate your business processes and tasks which will eventually boost up your productivity. You can only be productive and efficient if you regulate your business tasks through the help of different tools.

Otherwise, startup business will become a difficult and tiresome task. Or, you will end up hiring more employees and paying more salaries to manually run several business operations.